At the present time, plasmas are difficult to contain and utilize. One notable use of plasmas utilizing particles of opposite charge is in fusion reactors wherein the dual-charged plasma is raised to high energy levels and contained within strong magnetic fields. The dual-charged plasma is amorphous in shape in that it is contained as a ring shaped mass held in place by magnetic fields and includes particles of unlike charge having pathways or orbits within the ring that are not precisely fixed or defined.
Plasmas with a single sign of charge have been previously studied. (See, e.g., xe2x80x9cNon-Neutral Plasma Physicsxe2x80x9d (C. W. Roberson and C. F. Driscoll, ed.), AIP Conference Proceedings 175, Am. Inst. Physics, New York (1988).) These plasmas are known by several different names such as xe2x80x9cnonneutral plasmasxe2x80x9d or xe2x80x9csingle component plasmas.xe2x80x9d In nonneutral plasma research, studies are conducted in a regime of very stable plasmas with low speed energy per particle and low to modest plasma densities.
The main thrust of the studies of nonneutral plasmas is to achieve long term confinement of the plasmas and to study such properties as wave phenomena. In order to achieve long term confinement, these plasmas are stored in traps, such as the Penning trap, and are cooled to cryogenic temperatures. The free energy stored in these plasmas is minimized. The available energy per particle is typically about one electron volt or less. Typical densities studied are about 1013 mxe2x88x923 for conventional magnetic fields of about 700 Gauss or up to 4xc3x971016 mxe2x88x923 for high magnetic fields such as 80 kGauss (8 Teslas). These plasmas have very low ratios of plasma frequency to the cyclotron frequency. The relatively low density of these plasmas and their low stored energy per particle indicate that the total stored energy per unit volume, which is the product of the number of particles per unit volume times the energy per particle, is very low.
A traditional use of nonneutral plasmas is in particle accelerators such as cyclotrons where charged particles are raised to high energy levels and contained by complex magnets. The shape of the mass of charged particles is essentially amorphous. A third use of charged particles is for electron beams. These beams are useful for welding and deposition, but are transient in nature and of a simple, line geometry.
For the purposes of this invention, a single-charge or mono-charged plasma is defined as a collection of charged particles of like charge. That is, the mono-charged plasma or plurality of charged particles can be either all negatively, or all positively charged.
A plasma geometry that is fixed rather than amorphous is provided by the present invention in which the particles move in definable paths. When so configured, the mono-charged plasma will be containable and controllable to a far greater degree than an amorphous plasma. Energy can be added to or removed from the mono-charged plasma in a well defined, simple, and controlled manner opening new possibilities for energy storage.
The system provides a generator for a fixed geometry, mono-charged plasma having a specific toroidal shape. The system shapes the plasma into a toroid using a circular magnetic field generated by a charged particle beam, a single conductor, or a toroidal conductor coil, or other method.
A mono-charged plasma is shaped into a fixed and stable geometric form in which the orbit of the charged particles is definable and predictable. The geometry of the plasma will be a toroid, an elongated toroid, a figure eight shape or any number of desirable shapes. The toroid will be hollow, with a thin shell of orbiting particles. The particles orbit in various orbital layers based on the energy levels of the particles. That is, particles of lower energy have a smaller orbital radius than particles of higher energy. Within each orbit, adjacent particles couple together to form a matrix at temperatures of room temperature.
A fixed geometry plasma generator can include a vacuum chamber, electric field, charged particle source, and a circular magnetic field. In one embodiment of the fixed geometry plasma generator, a single conductor is used to generate a circular magnetic field. In another embodiment, a charged particle beam is used to generate a circular magnetic field. In yet another embodiment, a toroid conductor coil is used to generate a circular magnetic field. Microwave energy can also be introduced to raise the energy levels of the particles. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the toroid coil is modified to generate an infinite family of fixed geometry mono-charged plasmas.
A charge neutralizer is used to neutralize the total charge of the system. The charge neutralizer can be a collection of ions, an image charge on a metal surface or an ion charge accumulator. The charge neutralizer is spatially segregated from the orbital layers or shell of the toroid.
A further embodiment of the invention relates to a vacuum tube system employing the charge neutralized toroid for energy storage. An electron source assembly can be sealed onto a port of the vacuum tube to provide controlled injection of electrons.
The mono-charged system described above is of a single charge species, either all electrons or positively charged ions. A further embodiment of the present application includes a dual-charge spiral toroid plasma can be formed with both species of charge, as long as each charge species resides in a separate surface within the spiral toroid geometry. It is most easily visualized as a spiral toroid plasma with an external surface shell of electrons, plus an internal shell of ions. The two surfaces are separate and in this way the two species of charge remain separated.
The advantage of having the two species of charge is that the charge neutralization of the stable plasma toroid becomes easier. In the embodiment we discuss here, the number of ions is slightly greater than the number of electrons. This allows a greater amount of total charge in the overall stable plasma toroid with the same amount of external charge neutralization.
This invention provides a new class of stable plasma toroid that contains two species of charge. This addition allows it to be nearly charge neutral. It is called the dual-charge spiral toroid plasma.